Rosalyn Yalow was a stubborn and
single-minded child. Her parents wanted her to become a schoolmistress, but
instead they became a physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine. Rosalyn Yalow grew up in and lived almost her entire life in New
York. Her parents came from humble backgrounds, but that did not stop Rosalyn
and her brother, Alexander, from striving for something greater. Rosalyn began
to read before she began preschool. Her 7th-grade chemistry teacher aroused her
interest in science, and when at university, she took a liking to nuclear
physics. Rosalyn Yalow was married with two children.

Work

Rosalyn Yalow was a nuclear
physicist. She developed radioimmunoassay (RIA) together with doctor Solomon
Berson. RIA is used to measure small concentrations of substances in the body,
such as hormones in the blood. Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson tracked insulin
by injecting radioactive iodine into patients' blood. Because the method is so
precise, they were able to prove that type 2 diabetes is caused by the body's
inefficient use of insulin. Previously it was thought that the disease was
caused by a lack of insulin.

Rosalyn S. Yalow

(From Encyclopædia Britannica)

Rosalyn
S. Yalow, in full Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
(born July 19, 1921, New
York, New York, U.S.—died May 30, 2011, New York) American medical
physicist and joint recipient (with Andrew
V. Schally and Roger
Guillemin) of the 1977 Nobel
Prize for Physiology
or Medicine, awarded for her development of radioimmunoassay
(RIA), an extremely sensitive technique for measuring minute quantities of
biologically active substances.
Yalow graduated with honours from Hunter College of the City University of
New York in 1941 and four years later received her Ph.D. in physics
from the University of Illinois. From 1946 to 1950 she lectured on physics at
Hunter, and in 1947 she became a consultant in nuclear physics to the Bronx
Veterans Administration Hospital, where from 1950 to 1970 she was physicist and
assistant chief of the radioisotope service.
With a colleague, the American physician Solomon
A. Berson, Yalow began using radioactive isotopes to examine and
diagnose various disease conditions. Yalow and Berson’s investigations into the
mechanism underlying type II diabetes
led to their development of RIA. In the 1950s it was known that individuals
treated with injections of animal insulin
developed resistance to the hormone
and so required greater amounts of it to offset the effects of the disease;
however, a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon had not been put forth.
Yalow and Berson theorized that the foreign insulin
stimulated the production of antibodies,
which became bound to the insulin and prevented the hormone from entering cells
and carrying out its function of metabolizing glucose. In order to prove their
hypothesis to a skeptical scientific community, the researchers combined
techniques from immunology and radioisotope tracing to measure minute amounts
of these antibodies, and the RIA was born. It was soon apparent that this
method could be used to measure hundreds of other biologically active
substances, such as viruses, drugs, and other proteins. This made possible such
practical applications as the screening of blood in blood banks for hepatitis
virus and the determination of effective dosage levels of drugs and
antibiotics.
In 1970 Yalow was appointed chief of the laboratory later renamed the
Nuclear Medical Service at the Veterans Administration Hospital. In 1976 she
was the first female recipient of the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research
Award. Yalow became a distinguished professor at large at the Albert Einstein
College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in 1979 and left in 1985 to accept
the position of Solomon A. Berson Distinguished Professor at Large at the Mount
Sinai School of Medicine. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in
1988.

Title photo : SUNRISE

The photograph of 'sunrise' used in the title is taken by me using Sony digicam. No post-processing except I cropped it to fit in the place. Full series of the photos of that sunrise can be seen if you click on the label below: Photos